In the summer of 1998, George Lewis was at work on his history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a black collective that formed on the south side of Chicago in 1965. He was transcribing recordings of the AACM’s early organizational meetings, and even though he was on a fellowship at Civitella Ranieri, a 15th-century castle in Umbria, and a warm breeze blew in through his window across a field of sunflowers, the meetings were so charged and engrossing that he almost forgot where he was. “I’m listening to some of the same people I’ve known all my life talking about things,” Lewis says. “The neurons started firing as I listened to this meeting, and I had the urge to say, ‘Hey! No, don’t do that!’ Or I was getting mad at the same people I would get mad at in a real meeting.”
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Lewis himself joined the AACM in 1971, when he was in his late teens, and went on to become one of the world’s greatest trombonists and experimental composers. Though his own story is necessarily woven into the fabric of the book, he does a remarkable job balancing the voices of his nearly 70 interview subjects—not only does he avoid imprinting the material with his own biases, he frequently stops short of deciding which version of a contested event is correct. Members of Braxton’s regular trio and members of the Art Ensemble, for instance, are both allowed to take credit for the idea of briefly relocating key AACM artists to Paris in the late 60s and early 70s.
“I got a lot of e-mails from people saying what this person said can’t be in the book because it wasn’t true,” Lewis says. “I would say, ‘Well, they said the same thing about you!’ I had to avoid getting into a thing where the book does harm to the collegiality of the group, so I tried to take the approach of presenting as many different stories as I could.”
In the mid-60s, of course, the kind of professional opportunities Lewis has taken advantage of didn’t necessarily exist for musicians like him. Avant-garde jazz hardly draws big crowds today, but 40 years ago it was greeted with incomprehension and hostility. The music business in Chicago was built on bars, and that meant club owners wanted jazz bands to play standards that people could drink to. The AACM wanted a concert atmosphere, so they found alternate venues and presented their own series. They agreed on a mission, established rules, collected dues, even ran their own school. The idea was to build a self-sufficient parallel system, however modest, where they’d be free to follow their own paths.
Lewis didn’t expect A Power Greater Than Itself to take him more than ten years to finish, but it doesn’t bother him much that it did. “I’m glad it took that long,” he says. “When I started, certain people hadn’t attained the degree of musical maturity that they achieved later on, like Nicole Mitchell.” In the past few years Mitchell (who I profiled in the Reader last summer) has emerged as one of the most exciting flutists and composers working today. “When I finally got around to interviewing her, it was a good moment to do that,” he says, “much better than if it had been in ’97 or ’98.”
Tue 4/15, 4:15 PM, Claudia Cassidy Theater, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington, 312-744-6630. F A
